Fresh prince of Bollywood

In Shahid , he is a straight-edged lawyer who believes everyone is entitled to a defence. In Kai Po Che , he is Govind Patel, a Gujarati middle-class boy always looking to set up a successful enterprise. And in the eight other films he has starred in, he portrays as many distinctive characters and, like any good actor, stays true to all. Rajkumar Yadav aka Rajkummar Rao, 29, belongs to that school of acting where the truest allegiance is to versatility.

“As an actor I don’t want to restrict myself to one genre or a certain stereotype,” Rao says when we meet him just as he was leaving to collect this year’s National Film Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Mumbai lawyer Shahid Azmi in the acclaimed film Shahid . (He shared the award with Malayalam actor Suraj Venjaramood for Perariyathavar.)

“There are six billion characters in this world and while I can’t play all of them, I want to portray as many as I can. When people see me they should not remember me, but remember the character I played,” he says.

In the four years since his cinematic debut in Love, Sex aur Dhoka , Rao has won himself a formidable reputation as an actor most willing to try an alternative role. And that’s quite an achievement for a Gurgaon lad who started off as a complete newbie in the Hindi film industry. “I’d say that I come from a filmi family in one sense. No one’s connected to the film industry, but every Saturday the VCR was taken out and the whole family would watch three films back to back,” he says, adding, “there’s never been a Plan-B for me; ever since I was in school, I knew I wanted to be an actor.”

The Gurgaon he grew up in was barren and far removed from the ritzy malls that line it at every turn today. “My dad was a patwari (revenue official) and we have been here for a long time,” says Rao, the youngest of three siblings. Growing up, learning taekwondo and dance, he discovered a love for the stage during a Class X play. “I loved the special attention that people give you, and started feeling that I wasn’t just a regular guy. It was stupid, I know, but I knew then that acting was something I wanted to do.”

That led him to an acting course at the Shri Ram Centre in Delhi and “my parents started believing that I was serious about acting”. After his graduation he pursued yet another degree in acting, this time at Pune’s reputed Film and Television Institute of India (FTII).

“When I was in Delhi, like everyone else I loved Shah Rukh and Amitabh Bachchan. But then I went to FTII and that changed a lot of things… in the two years there, we were living and breathing cinema. I realised acting is something you can get deep into, it’s not only about looking good and saying the lines.”

After leaving FTII in 2008, Rao tried his luck in films. He moved to Mumbai, showreel in hand, and embarked on a round of unsuccessful auditions. “I was told a lot of mean things. Someone said my eyebrow is not right for the role. Someone else said I wasn’t fair enough to be a Hindi film hero. But it did not demoralise me, rather it inspired me,” he says.

After a year of struggling with disappointments, he came across an ad announcing that director Dibakar Banerjee was looking for newcomers. On learning that the role was that of a Delhi guy, he quickly bought himself a body-hugging t-shirt and hit the gym for two hours a day. “I was muscular at the time, so pumping iron made me look beefier. I was confident I’d get the role. Everything nosedived once I reached the audition though. The casting director yelled at me for the way I was dressed. The role was that of a simple, office-going guy and not some stud.”

Convinced he had lost out, he returned to Gurgaon only to be called back. Banerjee had liked his audition, and could he please return for the second round minus the muscles?

He did bag the role and the critical acclaim in its wake. Ragini MMS followed, and then smaller roles in Shaitan , the Gangs of Wasseypur films, Chittagong and Aamir Khan’s Talaash before Shahid happened. While Shahid may have won him plaudits, it was Kai Po Che that propelled him to stardom. As he puts it, “Before KPC people knew the characters I had played, nobody knew my name. But after the film everyone knew who I was.”

City Lights , directed by Hansal Mehta of Shahid fame, whom Rao considers “family”, has just hit theatres. After working on a short film with Mira Nair, he is currently shooting for his next film, Dolly Ki Doli , which co-stars Sonam Kapoor and Pulkit Samrat (of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi fame). Other upcoming projects include Revolution 2020 and Hamari Adhuri Kahani . “I just can’t take up more than one film at a time because I do a lot of research about each character,” he says.

As he leaves for the National Awards ceremony, we ask what his thumb rule is for choosing films. “The script should make sense and excite me as an actor. There should be something in there that I’m ready to give four months of my life to.”

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